NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE - CANCER.GOV

Contact Information

Primary Contact

Rachel Tracy
Communications Manager

Location

10 Center Drive
Bethesda, MD 20892

Overview

The NIH Center for Human Immunology, Inflammation, and Autoimmunity (CHI) is a trans-NIH resource whose mission is to provide a collaborative hub of advanced translational immunology for NIH clinical and pre-clinical studies. This uniquely structured program provides centralized and efficient management of projects in full collaboration with NIH investigators to better understand human immune function and pathophysiology. Our team works closely to plan and optimize experimental workflows tailored to each investigator’s specific research goals; execute highly sophisticated technological procedures on precious human samples; troubleshoot and optimize assays to generate high-quality data; seamlessly transfer data to our in house informaticians who perform multimodal computational analyses; and provide expert scientific consultation, interpretations, and recommendations throughout the project lifecycle – all in one place.

Established Technologies

Single Cell and Bulk Genomics

  • CITE-seq on blood and tissue samples to characterize transcriptomic profiles and expression of more than 100 cell surface proteins simultaneously.
  • ATAC-seq (often alongside CITE-seq within a single experiment) to assess chromatin accessibility and transcriptome profiling.
  • Single-cell RNA-seq for transcriptomic profiling in cellularly diverse samples.
  • Immuno-profiling by TCR and/or BCR sequencing.

High Parameter Cytometry and cell sorting

  • Up to 40-color spectral flow cytometry for precision immunophenotyping of PBMC, T-cell subsets, and specific tissues.
  • Mass cytometry using Helios CyTOF instrumentation and stimulation assays to simultaneously assess 8 phospho-pathways in 20 cell populations.
  • Flow sorting to enrich rare and antigen specific populations for single cell sequencing.

Proteomics 

  • The aptamer based SomaLogic SomaScan® assay to profile expression of 11,000 proteins from small volume samples of plasma, serum, CSF, urine, and more.

Bioinformatics

  • NGS, Flow, and SomaScan Data QC and analysis.
  • Transcriptomics data analysis for single-cell RNA-seq, CITE-seq, and Bulk RNA-seq.
  • Epigenetics data analysis for ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq.
  • Genomics data analysis for whole genome and exome variant calling.
  • Functional analysis for GO enrichment, Gene set enrichment, Pathway analysis, DNA motifs, and integration.
  • Computational pipelines for large-scale analysis and distribution, and Shiny apps.
  • Multi-omics analysis and data integration.

Major Instrumentation

  • SomaScan – The SomaScan® Assay is enabled by the generation of protein-capture reagents called SOMAmer® (Slow Off-rate Modified Aptamer) reagents. This proteomics assay measures approximately 11,000 protein analytes from a small volume of sample with high sensitivity and specificity.
  • 10x Genomics Chromium X – Single cell sequencing library preparation
  • Qiasymphony – Automated sequencing library preparation
  • Illumina NextSeq 2000 – Next Generation Sequencing
  • Cytek Aurora – High parameter flow cytometry
  • Sony SH800S flow cytometer – Cell sorting
  • Fluidigm Helios – Mass cytometry

User Guidelines

The CHI operates in three modes: collaborative scientific studies, scientific technology development, and technology partnerships. Collaborative studies aim to leverage the high-dimensional technologies and expertise available in the CHI to enable systems-level characterization of immune phenotypes. Collaborative studies will be selected competitively from a call for proposal which is announced multiple times per year. Scientific study proposals can also be selected as a technology development project if the aims of the proposal don't match the criteria to be selected as a collaborative scientific study. Alternatively, a subset of the technologies at CHI are available to any NIH users through the CHI Technology Partnership Program (TPP) where CHI can generate data for a fee to cover costs, but study design and data analysis are the responsibility of the customer.

Keywords

Autoimmunity and InflammationBiomarkerBiomarker discoveryCHICenter for Human ImmunologySOMAscanassayscomputing modelingepigenetic modulationProteins and Proteomicsflow cytometrygene expressiongenomehigh throughputimmune cellslipidomemetabolomeniaid-coreniaid-ncrnih-corenih-ncrproteomeprotocol development